^{The gospel to me is simply irresistible.
~ Blaise Pascal}

Reflect, Resonate, Reevaluate, Respond

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.
~ Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662, mathematician & physicist

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.
~ William S. Burroughs, 1914-1997, American writer and visual artist

~~~~~~~~ Mark 5:21-36 ~~~~~~~~

I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation. Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.
~ Jim Carrey, 1962- , actor and comedian

Feeling lost, crazy and desperate belongs to a good life as much as optimism, certainty and reason.
~ Alain de Botton, 1969- , Swiss-born British author and speaker

I would have stayed a hundred times and I would have left one time only—still, I left.
~ Mihail Drumeş, 1901-1982, an Ottoman-born Romanian prose writer and playwright.

Something they seem to omit to mention in Boston AA when you’re new and out of your skull with desperation and ready to eliminate your map and they tell you how it’ll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it.
~ David Foster Wallace author of Infinite Jest

I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face, questions die away. What other answer would suffice?
~ C.S. Lewis, 1898-1963, British writer & lecturer

God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas but for scars.
~ Elbert Hubbard, 1856-1915, Am. writer, publisher, philosopher

_{The gospel to me is simply irresistible.
~ Blaise Pascal}

Reflect, Resonate, Reevaluate, Respond

The heart clings to collected treasure. Stored-up possessions get between me and God. Where my treasure is, there is my trust, my security, my comfort, my God. Treasure means idolatry.
~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1906-1945, theologian, author

~~~~~~~~~ Matthew 13:44-46 ~~~~~~~~~

Screwtape writes his nephew and says, “I have some ideas on how you can destroy your human’s budding spiritual interest.” This is what he says.
“Work hard, then, on the disappointment or anticlimax which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman. […] Provided that any of those neighbors sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.”
~ C.S. Lewis, 1898-1963. British writer

The secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are… and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this.
~ Anne Lamott, 1954- , American writer

Does the Gospel I preach and teach have a natural tendency to cause people who hear it to become full-time students of Jesus? Would those who believe it become his apprentices as a natural “next step”? What can we responsibly expect would result from people actually believing the substance of my message?
~ Dallas Willard, 1935-2013, American philosopher

But the rub of revelation is that it’s a transformation you’re not in charge of.
~ Scott Erickson, performance storyteller

The transformation from water to wine is of course meant by John to signify the effect that Jesus can have, can still have today, on people’s lives.  He came, as he says later, that we might have life in all its fullness.  You might want to pray through this story with your own failures and disappointments in mind – remembering that transformation only came when someone took Mary’s words seriously: Do whatever he tells you.
~ N.T. Wright, 1948- , former Bishop of Durham